Cultural Politics and the Nation State

Anthropologists today are centrally concerned not only with “the local”, but with national-level political and cultural processes. Department faculty are powerfully engaged with such questions. Liisa Malkki has worked on nationalism and historical consciousness in the context of genocidal violence in central Africa, as well as on questions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. Kabir Tambar does research on the contested relation between nationalism, secularism, and Alevi community in Turkey. Paulla Ebron is engaged with questions of heritage and the representation of cultural patrimony in an American region associated with its African past. Miyako Inoue’s research addresses the way that Japanese “women’s language” has been intertwined with nationalism. Thomas Blom Hansen’s work is concerned with populist religious politics in India and associated issues of communal violence. Sylvia Yanagisako's research on the Italian fashion industry and its transnational collaborations with Chinese investigates the interconnections between the re-formation of capitalist practices and national identities.